What the Frack: Why Fracking is Not the Way Forward

With the general election only a year away, the major parties have started to publicise their intended policies and manifestos so it’s only natural that the highly controversial and divisive issue of fracking has begun to reappear in news stories and press releases. There’s been a lot of very heated debate about fracking but what is it and why should the gas companies frack off and leave our countryside alone?

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing for long, is the process of pumping millions of litres of fracking fluid (a mixture of water, sand and chemicals) into the ground at extremely high pressure to fracture bedrock surrounding an oil or gas well. This liberates the oil or gas so it can pass into the well and be collected and used to power all the stuff we rely on.

So far, so good right? Wrong. If you give even a cursory glance over the impact of fracking you end up finding some pretty disturbing stuff. Each gas well requires about 400 tankers trucks to carry the up to 8 million gallons of water required to complete each fracturing. That’s a hell of a lot of extra air pollution. Also when you look at the roughly 40,000 gallons of chemicals mixed with the water to make fracking fluid you see that its made up of about 600 different chemicals including lead, uranium, mercury, radium, methanol, hydrochloric acid and formaldehyde. I’ll save you some Google searching by telling you that in short all of these things are either radioactive, toxic, flammable or highly acidic and just generally insanely bad for things that enjoy being alive.

What’s even better is that these things leech through the rock into ground water reserves and therefore into the water we drink. For example, methane concentrations were found to be 17 times higher in drinking water wells near fracking sites in the US than in normal wells. Results similar to this have been observed over 1000 times which means the “poor technique rather than dangerous process” argument that gas companies like to use to dismiss anything that would decrease their profits doesn’t really hold up. Even more worryingly though, there have been well documented cases of sensory, respiratory and neurological damage due to ingesting this contaminated water.

This is partially because only 30-50% of fracturing fluid can be recovered from the well, the rest is just left in the ground where it happily sits there not bio-degrading. Forever. The only way to remove this fluid from the ground is leaving it in open air pits where it evaporates into the air causing acid rain and ground level ozone amongst other things.

The supporters of fracking have been coming off pretty shady politically as well over the last few years. Protests recently took place in several cities regarding a government report on fracking that conveniently had 63 sections deleted when compared to the initial draft. Most of these sections relate to communities no longer having the right to dispute fracking sites being set up near their houses which I would presume is because everyone would dispute heavy machinery pumping carcinogens into the ground near their house. Sneaky.

So far this sounds pretty bad but what are the benefits? Fracking produces approximately 300,000 barrels of natural gas a day in the US which means extensive fracking in the UK would really help us to become more energy independent and it would also provide a decent number of jobs and a cash injection into the economy. All of these things do admittedly sound like very alluring prospects until you consider how short term they are. What happens to all of the jobs and infrastructure we create for fracking when all the oil and gas runs out? Because that’s what fossil fuels tend to do, they run out.

Wouldn’t all of this money and time be better invested in renewable energy which would still create jobs, still boost the economy and still power all the things we need forever? It’s better than just waiting until all our fossil fuel reserves run out, leaving us powerless on a once beautiful island that we’ve completely destroyed. The only way to avoid this eventuality is to put pressure on the 3 main parties to prevent further fracking because so far they’re all worryingly for it so come on, let’s stop fracking around and put a stop to hydraulic fracturing.

Image via